The Great Book Robbery

57 min. Documentary, 2007-2012

Chronicles of a cultural destruction. The story of 70,000 Palestinian books that were looted by the newly created State of Israel in 1948. The film interweaves various story lines into a structure that is both dramatically compelling and emotionally unsettling. The interviews centre on eyewitness accounts and cultural critiques that place the book theft affair in a larger historical-cultural context; in the process, new light is shed on the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 and the moralistic-heroic Israeli narrative of the 1948 war is deconstructed.